Saturday, February 11, 2006
Coetzee: author, autor, literatus?
J.M. Coetzee in The Australian:
BOOKS of mine have been translated from the English in which they are written into some 25 other languages, the majority of them European. Of the 25 I can read two or three moderately well. Of many of the rest I know not a word; I have to trust my translators to render fairly what I have written. ...
As author I find it gratifying when a translator contacts me for advice. Among those who regularly confer with me are my French, German, Swedish, Dutch, Serbian and Korean translators. ...
My novel Foe, if it is about any single subject, is about authorship: about what it means to be an author not only in the professional sense (the profession of author was just beginning to mean something in Daniel Defoe’s day) but also in a sense that verges, if not on the divine, then at least on the demiurgic: sole author, sole creator.
Here is an exchange between my Serbian translator and myself, from the time when she was working on Foe:
AB: Autor, alas, is not a profession in Serbian. In some places I simply have to say writer (denotes strictly a literatus) ... [She goes on to caution against too many Latin-sounding words in a Serbian text.]
JMC: The notion that one can be an author as one can be a baker is fairly fundamental to my conception of Foe. “Writer” would suffice only if the distinction between writer and scribe/scrivener were quite marked.
AB: You write: “The notion that one can be an author as one can be a baker is fairly fundamental to my conception of Foe.” That is precisely the reason it worries me. The baker bakes, the author authors, yet our verb [in Serbian] is makes/creates. The English senses are better covered by tvorac (maker/creator/founder) [than by autor]. Defoe is properly the tvorac of Robinson Crusoe ... You also write: “Writer would suffice only if the distinction between writer and scribe/scrivener were quite marked.” It is, but the word lacks the symbolical quality of the English author. I think I will try to use the maker/creator word, toning it down with writer only when absolutely necessary.
JMC: That sounds the best solution. Makir (maker) is the word routinely used for poet in Scottish poetry of the 14th-15th centuries.
AB: Good to know about makir - such a resonant word.